[simongray]

It's actually kind of impressive how much transitional stuff Apple has introduced and then removed with Mac OS X and how right many of their decisions turned out. I guess Cocoa itself was an extension of the legacy NextStep API too. They also had Classic for running old Mac apps directly in OSX and later Rosetta for running PowerPC binaries on Intel (I guess the same tech was used for the 32->64 bit transition). So many technologies have been smoothly deprecated and removed over the years by Apple.

[stiGGG]

I don’t think you really can compare Apple’s and Microsoft’s situation here. Think of the extreme bigger amount of software that was written for Windows including all that custom made business software for small companies. Apple was always in the situation that a lot of their 3rd party developers were also „fans“, who are more willing to keep up with their transitions, where however most the Microsoft tech developers were just doing their job and want to keep their stuff only running with the least amount of work necessary.

[microtonal]

Apple was always in the situation that a lot of their 3rd party developers were also „fans“, who are more willing to keep up with their transitions,

That's true, but Apple also got behemoths like Adobe and Microsoft to port over their applications to modern APIs (Cocoa and Cocoa Touch).

[pjmlp]

Because Apple does the "take it our way or leave" approach.

Which is also a reason why they hardly have a meaningful market share across the enterprise world.

[scarface74]

Sure they do. It’s on mobile. While MS isn’t going anywhere in the Enterprise, anyone who is focused on the desktop when it comes to MS development instead of web, cloud, or even cross platform mobile development is headed down a dead end.

[pjmlp]

A little secret, laptops and 2-1 convertibles are desktops as well, while being mobile.

[scarface74]

If we want to be pedantic, a desktop could be considered mobile too since you can pick it up.

But in the real world when people talk about “mobile software” everyone knows that people are talking about iOS and Android. No one is chasing after the Windows software market, it’s been a diminishing platform for the past decade.

[pjmlp]

In the real world people are working on laptops, while using iOS and Android mostly to consume content, play games, browse web and show plane tickets.

When they actually become a match to laptops and 2-1 convertibles, maybe.

And there Chromebooks are no where to be seen outside US school system, iPad Pros are mostly a gimmick in rich countries and Android 2-1 are basically phone apps with keyboard.

[scarface74]

I am not saying that people aren’t using desktops to do work. What I’m saying that relatively few companies are putting money into writing desktop software. The jobs are limited compared to writing web based software.

If I ever got back into desktop software, it would be highly specialized low level C/C++ code and not WPF/Sharepoint/UWP software.